Read more from IOSH 2014: Lord Dannatt – soldiers and safety, a contradiction in terms
Kevin Furniss has urged those in the industry to put “leadership and not safety first”.
Speaking on the second day of the IOSH conference at London’s Excel, the Vice President, HSSE at AP Moller Maersk Terminals, referenced his three years at Vodafone, where the company’s core values had health and safety deeply embedded within them.
The telecommunications company applied this approach in an outward facing manner, however the challenge was to bring this internally to its own staff.
Adhering to the conference’s theme of leadership, Furniss said that “great leaders are human and talk to people, one part of which is inspiring people, without them realising it”.
Key to the speaker’s argument was the theory that this can be achieved without a safety management system.
Furniss continued: “Of course, naysayers will say there will have to be a process at some point, yet these procedures can have their complexity reduced and they should be linked through leadership”.
He concluded the talk by playing with a line from a well known secret agent: “We have a licence to operate, we have a licence to change but we don’t have a licence to kill.”
A topical debate, leadership or safety first? Did they consider production too, or was that over-looked? There is no doubt that positive leadership can drive safety if the mindset is established and there is a ‘culture’ where the ethos is the same. However, consider organisations where you just can’t have leadership, you need, as a HSE Manager/Advisor to put safety on the agenda, incidents are high, production low. Yes you need leadership, but that current leadership isn’t working. Where next? Yes, management. In my experience, some 18 years, there are very few ‘leaders’ in industry, those who strive to pull… Read more »